(Credit: Acer)
Intel is finally ready to unleash its gaming handheld chips. The company today officially introduced the Arc G-Series processors, which will use Intel’s “Panther Lake” architecture to offer an alternative to AMD’s rival silicon, already used in the Steam Deck and Asus ROG Xbox Ally X.
Intel is starting with the Arc G3 and Intel Arc G3 Extreme processors, which will power Windows 11 gaming handhelds. This includes an upcoming product from Acer, the Predator Atlas 8.
To stand out from the competition, Intel claims gamers won’t have to make any tradeoffs in terms of battery life and graphics when using a handheld containing Arc G3 chips, which have been built with the Intel 18A manufacturing node.
To pull this off, both processors contain 14 CPU cores: two are focused on high-performance, offering clock speeds up to 4.7 or 4.6GHz. Another eight have been dubbed “Efficient cores” that focus on multi-threaded performance. The remaining four “Low-Power Efficient-cores” are designed for everyday tasks while promising to use as little energy as possible.
(Credit: Intel)For graphics, the Arc G3 features a B370 built-in GPU that contains 10 Intel Xe cores. The Arc G3 Extreme bulks up the graphics processing power with the B390, containing 12 Xe cores. To offer higher frame rates, the chips can use Intel’s Xe Super Sampling or XeSS 3. On a Panther Lake laptop, XeSS 3 was able to run Cyberpunk 2077 at up to 170 frames per second.
PCMag's Michael Justin Allen Sexton noted the Arc G-series chips seem to be quite similar to the initial Panther Lake laptop processors that launched in January. "The Arc G3 processors are essentially Panther Lake chips with two P-cores disabled compared to the top-tier Panther Lake chips," he says. "Same graphics, same number of E-cores. Clock speeds are also in a similar range... Basically, everything else is either identical or ever so slightly lower."
The new Arc chips also support Wi-Fi 7 Release 2, dual Bluetooth 6, and Intel Thunderbolt 4. The company is promising “ongoing Day-0 driver support” to ensure the handhelds have been optimized to play the newest and existing games.
Acer is using the chips in the Predator Atlas 8, which features an 8-inch 120 Hz touch screen. The 1,920-by-1,200-resolution display supports a variable refresh rate and a brightness of up to 500 nits. In addition, the handheld packs a rather large 80Wh battery and two fans, one of them metal, to keep the chips running cool. Other perks include two Thunderbolt 4 ports and a UHS-II microSD card reader.
Intel adds that MSI’s Claw 8 EX AI+ will adopt the Arc chips, along with gaming handheld maker OneXPlayer. Expect the first product to arrive next month and throughout the year. Intel plans on sharing more at the Computex trade show in Taipei next week.
No benchmarks or pricing were released, key points that’ll determine if the Intel-powered products will appeal to consumers. Still, we suspect the Acer Predator Atlas 8 might be pricey. It can be configured with up to 24GB LPDDR5x RAM and up to 1TB of NVMe SSD storage.
The Intel-powered handhelds are arriving when the memory shortage has been inflating prices for consumer electronics. On Wednesday, Valve shocked consumers by raising the price for the OLED Steam Deck by as much as $300, blaming it on AI-driven memory shortage and even “global logistical” issues, a likely reference to the US-Iran war. The increase is so high that it’s raising concerns that gamers are being priced out of the market.